i'm developing a website (using dreamweaver) that contains some arabic text... i wrote this code into the head

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/html; charset=windows-1256">

where windows-1256 is arabic encoding... but when i preview the page it does not automatically display the text in arabic... instead it comes out as strange symbols.. so i need to manually change the encoding to Arabic (windows) in IE....

how do i fix this?

FYI i'm using php and mysql...